In the Dark

I’ve just taken a short break from reading grant applications and filling in forms to read through the stack of teaching questionnaires that arrived yesterday, along with a complicated statistical analysis which I won’t even try to explain – because I  don’t understand it.

These questionnaires are handed out during a lecture, filled in by the students (anonymously), and then sent off to be analysed by a team of elves.  Doing this during a lecture ensures a reasonable rate of return; in my case about 2/3 of the students returned completed questionnaires. The results are condensed into a “Figure of Merit” (FOM) using a mystic formula of some sort. If my FOM turned out badly I would probably try to work out what it means, but since it’s quite good I’ll just assume the algorithm is excellent.

Questions on the questionnaire are divided into questions about the module (we don’t have courses, we have modules),  e.g. is it easy, hard, interesting etc, and questions about the lecturer(s), e.g. was he/she audible, legible. Generally speaking, students seemed to enjoy this particular first-year module, Astrophysical Concepts, but also thought it was difficult. In fact it’s a generic outcome of this sort of analysis that modules that are considered to be easy don’t get the best student feedback – they don’t seem to  mind so much if the material is difficult, as long as it is interesting. I think that’s where astrophysics is a lot easier to score well than, say, solid state physics.

The only thing I was disappointed with was the score for the responses to the prompt “The lecturer wrote helpful comments on the marked homework“. In fact, I didn’t write anything at all on the marked homework because I didn’t mark it – that’s usually done by PhD students,  according to a mark scheme I provide. Nevertheless, I do post full worked solutions (on a system called Learning Central) along with the mark scheme after  the scripts have been returned to students so they can easily find out where they went wrong and how they lost marks. I though that, supplemented by the comments written by the markers on the scripts,  would be sufficient feedback. Obviously not. Heigh-ho.

More interesting than the statistical analysis (to me) are the individual comments written on the reverse of the questionnaire. Most don’t write anything at all here, but there’s an opportunity to massage one’s ego by reading things like “Best lecturer this term by a long, long way”. Actually, come to think of it, that was the only one that said that.

Occasionally, however, one comes across a disgruntled response. An example was

I think the homeworks should be on Blackboard. They never are. If you misplace a homework you can never get another!

Sigh. Actually, all the homeworks were put on Blackboard (the older name for Learning Central) at the same time that I handed them out. As a matter of fact, they’re all still there…along with the solutions in a folder marked Assignments.

Anyway, Astrophysical Concepts was fun to teach and popular with the students, so obviously it had to go. It’s now been discontinued and replaced in the first year by a module about Planets. But I think some of it will make a return in a new problem-solving class for 2nd year students…

PS. In case you’re not up with the jargon, “reflective practice” is “the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning” and is “one of the defining characteristics of professional practice” that involves “paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight.”

In other words, thinking about the stuff you do in order to do it better.

This entry was posted on September 9, 2011 at 11:49 am and is filed under Education with tags Cardiff University, education, Physics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.